First Love First

I'm excited. I know y'all are looking at the tree life right here and you're wondering what in the world is that going to be utilized for? We are starting a new series. We're calling it faith that sticks- Faith that sticks.

Somebody's excited, Some people want some sticky faith in this place.

Oh man, I feel like if I walk over here it's going to get dark. I don't know. Faith that sticks. I, we live in a.

We live in a world where I, I think we have a, and then it's almost like just this, this little hit that we take in on Sunday and we hope it's going to last as a high throughout the week and then we have to come in the next week.

But I think there's something more consistent, more more like sustainable. It has longevity, And I want to help you live a life of gratitude toward Jesus and faithfulness with regard to Jesus, that that will give you abundant joy, not just everlasting life. I mean I, I need you to know everlasting life is great. I want to spend eternity with God in heaven, New Jerusalem.

I don't know what all that stuff's going to look like, but I guess it's going to be a little better than here, And, and so I'm excited to spend all of eternity with God in heaven, And that was kind of what got me scared enough to step into a relationship with Jesus.

But you know, an understanding of eternity is not what sustains me in a relationship with Jesus. Actually, it is a daily relationship that I, I want to be careful with how I say this, because what Jesus did in your spirit, if you have trusted in him, if you have confessed with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, believed in your heart that God raised him from the dead, the Bible says you are saved. That's what it says. That is a very clear prescription for salvation.

And when you are saved, the Holy Spirit enters into your life and tries to have power over your life.

It tries to invest itself into every nook and cranny of your life. It tries to shape you and sanctify you so that when you do die- I mean there was been a life lived, filled with God- You can step into a walk with God, have eternity, but not necessarily a faith that that that sticks around daily. And we're entering into a new book. Many of you, may not have read this book.

It's kind of an intimidating book to read.

We're going to be in the Apocalypse of John, otherwise known as Revelation. The Revelation of John, not the Revelations of John, just to clarify so that I don't hear it when we're talking about it later. I don't know why, It's just a little pet peeve of mine. Call Revelation, not Revelations.

Everybody do you notice that?

Everybody calls it Revelations. I'm not judging you, It's okay. I'm going to move on. But it's the Revelation of John and it is an intimidating piece of literature because it is like literal speaking and symbolic speaking and futuristic speaking and present and historical speaking and other types of literature all interwoven into one text.

And the Lord gave it to us And now we, by the power of the Holy Spirit, are trying to understand what God is telling us.

And there are certain portions of the text that are very grounded and fairly easy to interpret. And then there are other parts of I'm just like I don't know. I mean half of y'all been all up in the real prophetic, like crazy, aspects of Revelation. All week You've been reading Revelation because you don't know what's going to happen.

Cuz craziness, Yeah, Yeah, I'm not going to say much more about it, but man, we need to be praying for our country and for the rest of the world.

We need to praying. Pray that Jesus, that that. What does it say in that song? That that heaven would come down to earth Like we want it to be on earth as it is in heaven.

That is our daily prayer, That is the Lord's prayer.

So we need to be praying for that. And some of you, when you came in here today, you were expecting me to talk about it And I want to talk about it, but I want to talk about it through the lens of what God really cares about, not some specific nuanced viewpoint in the book of Revelation that, you know, kind of wets your whistle a little bit as you want to go talk about politics later. I want to talk to you about real faithfulness, And we're going to be in Revelation, chapter 2. And I'm going to walk you slowly through this passage, but I'm going to give you something that I believe can be helpful to you.

But I'm going to ask you to elevate your attentiveness today.

Here's why: Because, even as I read through this, I have to really really think in order to apprehend what God is trying to say. And so if you come in here with kind of a, a static like position, like where you're like, just feed me. It's going to be really difficult for you to receive what you're looking for. So if anyone who's willing to kind of lean in a little bit just say amen, real quick, Amen, Awesome.

I'm going to jump right in.

In chapter 2, starting in verse one, I'm reading from the New American Standard Version: If you're utilizing your phone, if you have a physical Bible, that's okay. You're going to see the differential between this translation and another translation. It says this in verse one to the angel of the church in Ephesus right, The one who holds the seven stars in his right hand, the one who walks among the seven golden lampstands, says this: Now, pause, Put a blank on this. Actually, leave that verse on there.

Verse one: I got to break some stuff down.

Even there there's a lot of things that I think you need to understand before we dive further. This is just the intro, And he is writing to seven different churches in Asia Minor, present day Turkey, And even in this first passage he writes to the angel of the church. Now, angel comes from the Greek word angalas, which could mean angel. Like you know, the archangel Michael or Gabriel or whoever right could be angel, but it also means messenger, And so most scholars believe he's not talking about angel of the church.

He's talking about the pastor or leader of a specific church, This one being the specific church in Ephesus.

Now, Ephesus, at the time, was the second largest city in the Roman Empire. Can y'all guess what? The first largest city was Rome. Yeah Yeah, Rome is the first largest city in the Roman Empire.

Second largest city is Ephesus.

Ephesus is what they call a port city, meaning it's right on the coast. So people from all over the Mediterranean are regularly coming in and out of Ephesus. You're going to find that Ephesus, in the early church, had a very significant place. In fact, the rest of the churches, you could call Ephesus like the big brother church to the rest of these churches.

Ephesus was in a seat of much influence in the Roman Empire, And so the church, by nature, had influence.

And so John is writing to the leader of the church in Ephesus, a port city in the ancient Roman Empire, And he says this: "The one who holds the seven stars in his right hand, the one who walks among the seven golden lampstands, says this" Now, the one who holds the seven stars. He is referring to these seven churches, And then the seven golden lampstands are also a reference to these seven churches. Verse two: I know your deeds and your toil and perseverance and that you cannot tolerate evil men, and you put to the test those who call themselves apostles and they are not, And you found them to be false. And you have perseverance, that, and have endured for my name's sake and have not grown weary.

But everybody say but.

But I'm going to teach you some Scripture. If there's a butt, that means there's a contrast statement coming in, So you should pay attention to it. We used to say like you got to pay attention to big butts in Scripture. It's something you got to look for and pay attention.

No one's laughing, Adrian, I'm glad you're here.

Nobody's laughing. That's a funny. I mean, I used to sing Mix a lot when I would talk about that, but I don't anymore. I'm too old.

I'm too old for you people.

I'm trying to help you understand Scripture. That's the purpose of this. Don't leave here judging me for that statement. Now I, I love this.

I love this because there are going to be some churches that the author, John, we believe, the apostle, the beloved disciple, the guy who leaned on Jesus's breast at the Lord's supper.

Right, We just did communion. That's John right there. If you see the image, the Da Vinci painting- that's John right there. The beloved disciple, the one who was faster than Peter at running.

That's the guy we're talking about.

It's about AD85 to93, under the emperor Deian. All you need to know about this emperor was he instated a kind of localized season of persecution against the church. Now I'll break some of that down in a little bit or over the next couple of weeks, but long story short, you've got a political leader who was against Christianity at the time. John had this Revelation from God on an island called Patmas.

You know why he was on this island?

Because he was in prison for the Gospel. Some tradition tells us that he was boiled in oil. Yo, you think you suffering because you had a bad day. John got boiled in oil.

How many of y'all got boiled, boiled in oil this week?

Nobody, None of y'all. All right, So you can listen to what he has to say, because he knows what he's talking about And some of the letters he writes are going to be like really intense And when we get to those weeks I'm going to try to just you know, like, give you what John's saying. So don't get mad at me, It's John, not me John. But this week it's kind of a mixed bag.

He says some encouraging things and he's going to say some corrective things, But he starts out with this kind of encouraging word to them, He says: "I know your deeds and your toil and your perseverance and that you can't tolerate evil men And you put to test the ones who say that they're apostles and they're not, And you found them to be false teachers.

And even this you have had perseverance and you've endured over time. For my name's sake, He's going to go in with the butt, with the contrast, with the negative, with the corrective, with new direction, But he starts out with positive And I want- I want to take this moment to cast a little bit of vision for our church. Can I do that for a second? There is something very positive about the church in Ephesus.

Now there is a negative.

They're missing something, something very crucial. But what is very positive is that they have become a seat for the or correct theology in this region. They are known for putting aside false teaching and focusing on that which is correct. That's number one.

We call that orthodoxy: Right belief, right worship.

Okay, that's orthodoxy. They have good orthodoxy. I bet some of y'all have heard about churches who don't have good orthodoxy. We call those heretics.

I don't call people heretics all the time, but I need you to know the religion that you are subscribing to when you come into Orbit Church.

We are very concerned about ortho right doxy worship. We want to be worshiping God correctly. We want to do things the way that God has asked us to do them. We want to honor what the Bible says.

There are a lot of people who just look at the Bible say, that's a cool suggestion and let me go do church the way I want to.

And we don't want to be a church like, like that. In fact, I would love for us to be like Ephesus, in this case We're out in the southwest valley of Phoenix, or goodness, maybe here in Arizona, maybe in the country, maybe in the world, that we are known as a church who has orthodoxy, who worships the right way, Amen, somebody. That's exciting. I want to be known for a church that honors what the Bible teaches.

I don't, I don't want to neglect that, And the author John is not neglecting the importance of right worship.

I mean some of. I want to encourage you personally, not just here at the church, but in your personal time. How many times do you go through your week? You never open God's word, but you get a feeling and you call it God.

I've done it before.

That's why I did that whole sermon a couple weeks ago called: is it indigestion, upset stomach or the Lord? You? Sometimes it's difficult, but a lot of times it's indigestion, and the way that you reduce the indigestion is you open up God's word. What do they say?

A proverb a day keeps the devil away is really important for us to understand God's word now.

You might be intimidated by that, but don't let your intimidation cause you to be inhibited in your connection with God through his word. The power of God, supplied to us in our weaknesses is that his Holy Spirit will guide us when we're opening God's word. Even if we're not a theologian, God will help you as you trust him and open his word daily. Be a person who worships right now.

The second thing that they did is it said that they endured.

They endured. They are known as a church who has resilience. How many of you want resilience in your life. I want it, That's one of my gifts.

But the reason I have resilience is cuz I make a lot of dumb stuff happen.

I make a lot of mistakes. Hannah, you know this, You've seen it. You've seen how often I've been resilient. Resilient means I keep getting punched in the face and then I keep getting backed up.

At some point I got to figure out how to stop getting punched in the face.

But I am very resilient. This church was very resilient. Now, if you want to go back to the early history of Ephesus, this is a church that Paul helped to plant. He started it, in probably the 40s, 50s probably, and then the letter of Ephesus was likely written in the 60s to Timothy.

At the time Timothy was Paul's young Padawan And so Timothy was leading this church.

It seems to me that maybe he would identify Timothy if Timothy were still leading the church. But somebody at this point is leading the church of Ephesus, this angel, this messenger, And that that history helps us understand that there have been 25 to 40 years of endurance of this church in Ephesus. They've been through it. I mean, the temple was destroyed in Jerusalem in AD.

70. And there was probably a lot of craziness happening.

If you were a Jewish- like non-follower of Christ, or if you were a Jewish Christian, it would have gotten crazy. When that temple was destroyed, when they were at war literally against the Jews, And you're going to synagogue in Ephesus or you're going to church in Ephesus and people are like, "We're not on the same page as you". There was endurance. They kept through it, even through the edict of Claudius.

When people were kicked out of, Rome and they had to go to different parts of the Roman Empire and there were.

There was a Neero persecution where people were lit up like candlesticks. Isn't that crazy? I said it like I'm happy about it. I wasn't happy about it, but Christians were lit up like candlesticks.

There was a fire in Rome and because of the Christians- or, like Nero said, it's because of the Christians- that that fire happened, And so there was kind of a an empirewide persecution.

For a moment- And with Dian it's coming back again- There was actually a cibiline oracle that said that Vuvius happened because they had destroyed the temple, And so there was a lot of fear and turmoil happening in the empire And Ephesus was still kicking. They were resilient through all of the various things that were happening. I want us to be a church that's resilient. I want us to be a people that is resilient When you walk out of this door and you lose something that you thought you would always have.

When you walk out this door and someone says something to you about your faith that you never thought they would say.

When you walk out this door and Satan hits you in the face with all of the dopamine hits that aren't Jesus, I want you to have a faith that is resilient, A faith that sticks. Ephesus has both of these things. So, before we talk mess about them and before I finish my message, I want you to know that this is a church in a seed of influence who has done great things- And you could probably think of churches who have done great things, but over time they lost their mission and they started like we. There's actually a curve that we all know as pastors.

We call it the church growth and decline curve, And what happens is you start off, you're mission focused, You're excited, Then people gather around the mission, Then you get to this spot where there's flourishing that occurs, And then eventually you get maybe a second generation of people, or maybe you get a new pastor, or maybe the pastor just gets old and lazy.

I, I'm just sorry I'm not trying to be me, Call me out on that if I get old and lazy. But you get to this peak of the growth curve in a church, And then what happens is what we call mission drift, And you forget something that you had at first. The whole room forgets something that they had at first. So people start to leave the church, People become stagnant in the church, People are aged and unwilling to reach the next generation in the church, And so what happens is the decline portion of the curve.

Most churches go through this same trajectory.

Let's be real, though: a lot of Christians go through the same trajectory. A lot of people just go through this trajectory. Sometimes it happens at different points in our life, But what we're called to do is constantly reinvigorate a focus on the main mission, And this is what John the Apostle is saying to the church at Ephesus. So in verse four he says this: "But I have this against you: that you have left your first love.

Therefore, remember from where you have fallen and repent and do the deeds you did at first, or else gosh.

I wouldn't want to hear that from the Lord" or else I'm going to come to you, or I'm coming to you and will remove your lampstand out of its place unless you repent. So his indictment against the church at Ephesus is that they have left their first love. Now scholars do not know what first love really means. We have a lot of educated guesses, and I'm going to give those to you today, But you can imagine, the first thought that comes to my mind is that when we enter into a relationship, when we enter into an organization, when we enter into a new season, we're excited.

How many of you were excited to come to church for the first time?

Some of y'all weren't. You were drug here, but you know, when you trusted in Jesus, right When you heard the love of Jesus and you were like, "Oh, my gosh, someone loves me. Nobody else loves me like he loves me. This is amazing".

When I came to church I didn't want to go.

My mom forced me to come to church and then I came and it was awkward for a little while, But eventually this girl started talking mess about me, Said I was going to go to hell. I thought she was right at some point. After being frustrated Then, when I trusted in Jesus, I realized for the first time that there was a God that loved me. He cared for me, That he didn't care how much wrong I had done, that even when I was hostile to him, he was willing to make me holy by his son, Jesus, dying on the cross, Right.

That was an exciting thing for me, And when I realized that I was kicking around, I was like "Let's go, I'll do anything".

I remember my first mission trip after I became a Christian. It was like a year and a half in. We went up to Seattle and I'm walking around. We have all these ancient Christians that grew up in a Baptist church.

Right, They were 15 years old, but they grew up there, They were born in that church and they were used to it.

But I wasn't used to it. I was walking around. I walked into this restaurant in Seattle. It wasn't a restaurant we should have walked into And I didn't know what pot smelled like.

But I walked in and I smelled this really sweet smell and I was like: "This smells good in here.

It's a bunch of Jamaicans sitting right here, A bunch of Dominicans sitting right here. I don't know what this is, but they're eating a lot of fish and there's fish heads sticking out of the rice that they're eating. Let's hang out. And I walked in.

I was going to tell them about Jesus And they looked at me and they were like, "Come eat with us, brother".

I- That was the worst impression, but that's what it sounded like. I'm not making fun of you, That's That's what it sounded like. And I was about to walk in cuz I didn't know any better. I was excited.

My first love was Jesus.

My second love was people. I wanted to bring them together And then someone grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me out of that restaurant- And I'm not saying they were wrong, I was probably going to get arrested if I stayed too long. But at the same time there was a part of me that was like "What's up with you guys". And what happens sometimes in our faith is that we get so familiar with the love of Jesus that we forget about how important it is for us to daily live in gratitude about it.

We forget our first love.

Other translations will say: the love that you had at first. I've been there to an extent. I am there because it's hard to like, like recapitulate on the things that you've experienced since I've grown older. I've grown wiser.

I know what not to do.

I know what to do And it's easy to live in logic when you know what you're supposed to do. It's easy to live in faith when you have no clue what to do- And I'm going to bring that back later. But that's what a lot of scholars think happened is, the E Ephesian church has kind of lost their first love. They're more concerned about orthodoxy than they are the actual presence of God.

But who cares if you worship right, if you're missing a true relational connection with the God of the universe?

Who cares if you say the right things, if you're not living in a way that is connected to your creator? Who cares? And you've been to churches like that- And I'm not trying to talk mess about the people- just because they lost a little bit of the love that they had at first, but it's important for us to reinvigorate a focus on that love. I want to get back to that place And many of you in here you may not have the love of Christ in your life, You may not have experienced him.

I want to give you a moment, an opportunity in a few minutes.

But, but for those of you who have experienced the love of Jesus and tasted and seen the goodness of God. I want you to remember what that feels like. It is good for you, every day, every week, at some point in your life, regular occurrences It's. It's good for you to try to remember.

Paul even says to the people when he's writing to Corinth, and they're messing around with a bunch of stuff because they've forgotten about the goodness of God.

They got used to it. And he says: ' Remember where you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise according to the world, But God took foolish people in order to shame that which is wise, And he took me, a guy that was walking around like a chicken with his head cut off. He took you.

You're not as smart as you could be.

You're not as athletic as other people were. You're not, as you know, like wellendowed in terms of giftings as other people are, But guess what God called you anyway. Remember that. That'll give you a lot of love.

I remember with great fondness the people who called me upward when no one else would.

They believed in me when someone else didn't, And I need you to know that the God of the universe, even in the midst of your hostility, loves you enough to call you upward, And he did that for you. The Ephesian church has forgotten that in lie of calling out false teachers, And I think I think we should do one without forgetting the other. We should, we shouldn't forget about the very things God's called us to And we shouldn't forget the way to worship God rightly. We should not forget his word.

But a lot of scholars would say that it's not just chronological right, The first love, the love that you had at first, the one that you started with.

A lot of scholars would say it has to do with your prioritization. Loving comes before other things. It's interesting because Paul tells us in his letters to the Corinthian church. He says: "Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up".

He says: "The greatest of the gifts is faith, hope and love".

When Jesus calls out Peter after he had formerly rejected him, he says that his call is to love other, to feed my sheep, to feed my lambs. When we hear from John about Jesus, he spends more time telling us about Jesus's love for us than he does write orthodoxy, Though I guess everything John wrote was technically orthodoxy because it was canonized in our current Scriptures. But the verse we all remember is not the one about orthodoxy, It's the one about God's love, For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever may believe in him shall not perish but have everlasting life. And so the other way that I translate this passage is: not just you've forgotten the love you had at first, It's you've forgotten the love you should, what you should have put first.

You should.

You forgot that you should put love first. I said that wrong the first time. I'm so sorry, God. You forgot that you should put love first.

You should love God before you think about anything else.

Now, there's a reason that I put this candalabra, this manora here. There's a reason that I put this manora here. This manora is what would have been in the holy place of the temple, Not the most holy place, but in the holy place. In fact, this manora, was representative of so many things.

It's like it's, it's stressful how many things it represents.

I was scared to come up here and talk to you about it because of how many things that this represents. In one place. You can see that it is like imminent of a tree right here, and many scholars think that it was put in this place, in this way to symbol branches that come from a tree, reminding people of the garden, in the center of which was a tree of life, which is also referenced in this text in a moment. What is very clear?

Scholars all agree on this for the most part: that this light was the only light in the temple place and this would be the only light that lit the temple for the Levitical priests who would come in.

It also represented the call of God on Abraham to be a light to the nations, that every time a Levitical priest would come in and relight the candle, trim the wicks and make sure that they put more olive oil- pressed- specific pressed olive oil- in the different components and then reit it. It was a reminder to the priests that they were called not just to be Jewish but to be a nation from which God's glory manifests itself to the rest of the nations. It was a light to the nations. Now you can tell in reading right now that John is referring to lampstands.

He doesn't just say lampstands, He says golden lampstands.

Now, if you are a Jewish believer in Jesus at the time that this is written, you will know exactly what he means. And what John means. When he says golden lampstand, every single one of them would have thought about the temple that was formerly destroyed. And he says that there are seven golden lampstands that represent the seven churches that John is writing to.

What he's saying is: each of these churches now is meant to be a light to the nations, a manifestation on this earth of the presence of God, And so, in some ways, them forgetting their first love at Ephesus, is meant to call out in them something that happened in ancient Israel as well.

This is what Jesus said when he walked into the temple. He says: "This was meant to be a house of prayer for the nations, Yet you've made it the den of robbers and thieves". John is saying to the church at Ephesus: "Don't just be a church of right worship, be a church, a house for the nations. Otherwise, if you don't tend to this, it's going to go away, And I'm going to remove the lampstand from its place.

Now.

I want to be very clear. He's not talking about salvation, He's talking about the church, And if that church wants to be a representative of God to the nations, it needs to do what the Levitical priest, did You know what they had to do every single day? They had to put more oil in, They had to trim the wicks And then they had to relight the candles. They had to daily tend to what was manifested as the presence of God, that was symbolic of a light to the nations, God's calling on Abraham, And so what he is saying to Ephesus- just to summarize all of the symbolism that I just gave you, that you weren't ready for I told you had to lean in.

To summarize that, what I'm saying is this: that we are called not to forget the presence of God, the love that we have for him, And we are called not to forget the great commandment, which is to also love our neighbor as oursel.

In other words, we are called to be a church that loves God and loves others frequently. We have to constantly tend to the realities that God has called us to, to daily love him, to daily love others. And the church at Ephesus? They were concerned about how to think of him, not how to relationally love him.

The church at Ephesus, they were concerned about how to call out false teachers, not how to love their brothers and sisters, not how to be a house for the nations.

And so I got so convicted this week because I was thinking about how I'm trying to build this thing. And let's be real, I- I- I know you hate it, but I have to file a 501c3 in order to do church properly in the state of Arizona. I have to technically make us into a corporation in order to be an organization in the state of Arizona. I, I, I- have to do certain things in a business way in order to do church in the United States.

I know you hate it, It's just part of the game, But sometimes I go beyond what I should and I have a mentality that is more corporate than it is, like reminiscent of the first love.

I didn't get into this to build a building. I didn't get into this to build an organization. I didn't get into this to have a crowd of people in the room that listen to what I say. I didn't get into this just to have people jumping around and raising their hands.

I got into this because I was called by God in my own bedroom, to be a light to the nations.

And so often I forget the love that I had at first and I forget often not to prep, to preach first, but to first love others. And so I felt convicted by God later in the week-, I wish it was longer, but sometimes it takes a while for God to beat things into my skull- And I felt convicted And I think the best way that I can, kind of like, sacrifice my own flesh, and I think that, hopefully, will be representative of all of our flesh. I'm going to sacrifice some of my flesh on the altar of trying to recoup that first love experience, And what I feel compelled to do right now is to, similarly to how they would put olive oil into the candle in order to keep it lit, I think we need fuel to keep the flame of our church lit, And I think that fuel- I'll just read my first. I'll read my point- Love isn't something that you feel, It's something that you fuel- is what I put.

And then last night, God gave me something way better: That faith is the fuel to greater love toward God and others.

It's faith, And so I guess I'll say it this way- The Lord called me to take a faith step. Now, this is a faith step for me, and I hope it's a faith step for you, but it's an encouragement of a greater faith step for each of you in your life, And I'll break that down in a moment. But what I want to do is remember my first love. I want us all, as a church, corporately, to remember our first love, and it's love toward God, Meaning we're going to trust him with faith steps, and it's love toward our brother.

Galatians says this: we're called to bear one another's burdens.

We're called to be a light to the nations, And how are we going to be a light to the nations if we don't bear one another's burdens? And there are a couple people that I'm thinking about who have burdens that we, as a church, are uniquely positioned to bear. And so what I want to do today we're going to give $10,000 away, and it's going to be split up as follows: 25,500 of that is going to go to our missionary in Mexico, Ben. $2,500 of that is going to go to somebody in second service.

And, this morning I'm going to give $5,000 to somebody, somebody who has been super crucial in the operations of this church and someone who's going through a very, very hard time.

Yet they've continued to remain resilient, faithful, and they have evidence of faith that sticks that they remembered to love first. They haven't forgotten their first love, like I have And. So what I want us all to do is just take a take a moment in faith, David. Can you come up here?

David, Michelle, Michelle in the back, She's in the back.

I didn't tell her. Maybe I should have told her, But I don't want you to guess. I mean, he moved out here and he has done so much, not just to sacrifice for the church, but with his belief that God called him to do something like out here, and with the belief that God wants to reach people out here. And so I couldn't, I couldn't help as I was praying and thinking about the situation you're involved in right now.

If you don't know this, he had a heart attack about a month ago, Just about, Yeah, Just about- a month ago.

And when you have a heart attack and you work a job, it's really difficult to work a job while you're recovering from a heart attack. And so they're in a situation right now where there's plenty of people to provide for, but not enough funds to do so when you can't work, And he is the head of household. And so we've been watching, praying. I've been waiting on the Lord to give me, some sort of conviction on it.

We were always going to help, but I just didn't know how we were going to do it.

And, God convicted me of it literally yesterday afternoon, And I had prepped the sermon earlier in the week. But I didn't. I just I don't know, I didn't feel it. But anyways, I'm not going to overly speak.

For me, this is a faith move, believing that God's calling us not to keep and hoard and store, but to continue to serve our community.

And you are a part of our community, an integral part of our community. And so we'll work out the details later, but you should go let Michelle know, at some point. You don't have to tell her, You just she can see it in the bank account later. I just want you to know we love you, we care about you.

And, if there's anything that you can take from this other than, oh, might happen for me one day, Don't think that, who knows it could in different ways.

I should have said that, but here's, here's the truth, guys. The truth is the fuel to greater love for God and greater stepping into your calling is more faith, not less. It's more steps of faith, not less. Honestly, I love you to bits.

This is a faith move on our part, And not just because you're spe, you're all special in the name of Jesus, but it's a faith move on our part, believing that God's going to bless that you happen to be the recipient today, but someone else will be the recipient another day of your faith.

But if you don't take steps of faith to fuel that which God placed in our midst, I wonder if your responsibilities will continue to increase in your calling. I wonder if you will benefit in the way that you have prayed, for God wants you to relate to him, to tend to his presence daily, And so there are a couple. Y'all give it up for David. Sorry, I don't want to keep you up.

I'm going to be honest with you.

There are a few people who knew about that, and that was a step of faith for us, But, for you, there's a step of faith right in front of you that God wants you to take, And I'm believing today that that step of faith is the fuel for, like, greater connection with God, greater, a greater essence of purpose in your life And let's just be real joy. And so I want to give you a couple action steps today For the for the first group I want to give you. I told you I was going to keep talking about it. You know this.

The beautiful thing about God and about this passage really is we've forgotten our first love, And it's interesting: Not only are we called to love first, but we love first be because he loved us first.

And, I want to give you an opportunity to take this step of faith that, if you've never encountered the love of God, the Bible says you can receive it by confession and by belief, Right Worship, if you will. And so if everybody would bow their heads and close their eyes, I want to encourage anyone in here who has never taken the step to trust in Jesus and follow him with their life. Salvation is what we call that. I want to give you the opportunity right now to pray this prayer with me and confess that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, And I believe this step of faith will be a fuel toward a greater love of God and the greater essence of purpose in your life, And we do that out loud here for the benefit of those praying it for the first time.

Repeat after me: Say: God, I believe God.

I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, that Jesus Christ is the son of God. I believe he died on the cross. I believe he died on the cross and rose from the grave forever. Forgive me of my sin, Forgive me of my s, Make me a new creation.

Make me a new creation And I will follow you.

I will follow you for the rest of my life, For the rest of my life. Today is my new beginning. It's in Jesus name that we pray, Heads bowed, eyes closed. If that was you and you prayed that prayer to receive God's love today, want you just quickly, at the count of three, shoot up your hand.

We'll celebrate.

1, 2, 3. Come on, Let's celebrate those who have just trusted in Jesus. That.